Context is vital. It provides a grounding for our conversations, focus and actions, both personal and professional. In the same way that punctuation can completely change the essence of a sentence (“Let’s eat, Grandma.” being very different from its non-punctuated alternative), so context can completely change the meaning of what we’re doing. From a work point of view, context helps people understand the why of what we do.
Category: Team Management
Practice, obsession and the catch-up game
I’m currently reading Bounce, the book by Matthew Syed that debunks the “Talent Myth”. It’s a well-written exposition of how the individuals we think of as being child prodigies or otherwise abnormally gifted, often had circumstances that were highly conducive to their later success.
He writes convincingly of the 10,000 hour “rule” for developing expertise. This states that in order to develop world class expertise in a particular field, one has to apply focussed practice for around 10,000 hours in order to achieve it. In the case of many of the highly recognisable names, they had accumulated that level of practice by their late teens or early twenties.
So what do we do if we want to become expert-level (not necessarily world-class) at something later in life? How do we accumulate the expertise when we are typically much more time-poor?
Continue reading “Practice, obsession and the catch-up game”
Managing the squeaky wheel
If you’ve managed teams or organisations for a while, you know there’s invariably one. The team member who gets categorised as “high-maintenance” or sometimes even “highly strung”. They are valuable members of the team, often solid engineers, technologists or other specialists, but they consume a disproportionate amount of your time as a manager.
So what can be done? Continue reading “Managing the squeaky wheel”